The shelled worm is a tommotiid called Wufengella bengtsoni.
A bristly armored"worm" that scuttled across ocean reefs 518 million years ago is the ancestor to three aquatic animal groups that today live very different lifestyles, and it offers new clues about the explosion of diverse species at the time, a new study finds.
The find adds a new piece to the puzzle of how animals evolved during the Cambrian explosion, a time during the Cambrian period when early life diversified rapidly on Earth, introducing and establishing a variety of different body plans that we still see in living animals today. "One of the things that we often mentioned when we were sitting in the pub and fantasizing about what we could hope to potentially find one day was this elusive tommotiid," co-author Jakob Vinther, an associate professor of macroevolution at the University of Bristol in England, told Live Science. The fossil was found at the Chengjiang Biota fossil site in Yunnan, a province in southwestern China.
While the researchers predicted W. bengtsoni's general body plan, some features in the fossil were a big surprise. It had flaps on its body that could have been used for suction purposes, to fix the animal to the reef when there were waves, Vinther speculated The species also had long bristles on its sides that may have been used for sensing prey or as protection against predators.
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